It sucks to throw 30% of your hard-earned income out of the window

But you do when you use the Mac App Store. You can join the league of pro Mac devs and stay in control of app distribution, offer upgrade pricing, take care of your customers, and build a thriving business. Best of all: You can have all that in a day.

Sell outside the Mac App Store to increase revenue per sale and get to know your customers. This book shows you how. Fully functional, super-clean coded sample apps, everything ready to be copied right into your project, backed by more than 200 unit tests in total!

I believe that the Mac App Store just isn’t the best way to reach your customers. If you have to build an audience for your products anyway, why drive them to Apple’s store? There, the custom is to leave 1-star reviews to ask questions and leave feedback. With your own store you will earn more per sale and provide better support, thus increasing customer satisfaction.

To sell outside the Mac App Store doesn’t have to take more than a couple hours. Save days of research and start selling your app before an Apple review person would even notice your upload to the App Store.

I fell in love with FastSpring. The platform is easy to use and offers a ton of cool features, including bundle sales, discounts, and custom store designs. Their support team replies super fast. You will like what they offer. And if you don’t, I’ll give you a 100% refund. Period.

The Mac App Store Leaves You Alone

It won’t help you start a business. When you sell on the Mac App Store …

it costs you 30% of the revenue (excluding VAT),

and you can’t provide a demo,

and you can’t provide upgrade pricing,

and you don’t get to know your customers.

If you want to create a business, all of these are vital factors. Are you ready to ditch all this for the convenience of publishing on Apple’s store?

Philip Goward, founder of Smile, calls the Mac App Store a “warehouse.” Don’t make your application a cheap commodity. The benefit of discoverability on the Mac App Store is miniscule. Having full control over sales and customer service becomes more important when you’re serious about your business.

Join the Ranks of Famous Indie Developers

FastSpring is a very well established e-commerce platform where a lot of big indie developer studios sell their applications for years.

It’s easy to get all the flexibility of selling outside the MAS with next to no effort. You’re in good company – and I’ve collected quite a few case studies of renowned indie teams, like:

Smile Software (TextExpander, PDFpen)

Realmac Software (Clear, RapidWeaver)

Tyler Hall (VirtualHostX)

Ironic Software (Yep, Leap)

Bohemian Coding (Sketch)

toketaWare (iThoughtsX)

well, and me, obviously :)

Pieter Omvlee revealed that Bohemian Coding, creators of the infamous Sketch design tool, initially sold via PayPal around 8 years ago. Bohemian Coding moved to FastSpring because of the better features, namely handling VAT automatically. Even though Sketch was sold exclusively on the Mac App Store when Apple opened its doors, after re-introducing FastSpring for volume licenses it turns out their own FastSpring-based store performs better than the Mac App Store.

Tyler Hall started his business by selling VirtualHostX via PayPal from 2007–2009, too. But he switched once a friend of his was locked out of PayPal due to “suspicious” activity. – Imagine your sales going strong, then suddenly your payment processor blocks your account because they don’t treat you like a customer. That equals sudden death (or at least prolonged coma) for your business. Stuff like that still happens. To an e-commerce provider you as the store owner are the primary customer. FastSpring will talk to you and treat you well. That’s a huge difference.

You can make more money per sale, stay in touch with customers, and integrate a time-based trial and license code verification into your app within the hour!

Implement a registration handler in your app which verifies the license information. You can copy this well-tested code right into your existing app!

Add a time-based trial to your application which expires even when the application is running. This, too, can be copied right into your existing app.

As a bonus, you’ll learn a few things about Mac software architecture through well-written, fully functional sample applications which are thoroughly tested. There are more than 200 test cases included in the code repository!

Here’s what FastSpring’s CTO Mike Smith has to say about the book:

We appreciate Christian’s efforts in creating a guide that enables Mac developers to sell applications through FastSpring’s award-winning e-commerce platform. He has provided detailed instructions to help developers configure key elements of their online sales process. The spirit of community captured in his book reflects FastSpring’s mission to connect people globally in the digital economy.

By the way, I just found out FastSpring repeatedly won awards. They were finalists in the community-based 2015 SIIA Software CODiE Awards, for Best Subscription Management Solution and Best eCommerce & Billing Platform.

FAQ

Q: It’s written in Swift! What about the frequent Swift language updates?

I’ll keep the book and the code up to date so you are always equipped with the latest technology. Apart from updates depending on Swift, I’ll update contents based on reader feedback and my own experience.

I intend this book to be an investment in your indie career. It will accompany your journey until the world’s end – or until Macs stop to work the way they do.

Q: How can I get the updated version?

Just use the download link you received after your order! It’ll work for every future update and is bound to your order number. Just shoot me an e-mail if you lost it and I’ll give you a new one.

Q: Do you offer a money-back guarantee?

Totally. Either you’re 100% happy or you get your money back, guaranteed for a lifetime. – Mine, first and foremost, because nobody else checks my mail :)

Clean Cocoa

Brought to you by Christian Tietze, author, speaker, teacher, and app developer.